


Home is where you are

by Solveig69



Category: Ylvis
Genre: M/M, Slow Build, not brothers in this fiction
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2018-12-16 16:31:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11832624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solveig69/pseuds/Solveig69
Summary: I promised to continue with my story, so here it is. Hope you´ll enjoy it. Looking forward to your feedback :)





	1. I.

Vegard got out of the car, slammed the door a bit too loudly to his liking and locked it. After another exhausting Monday at work he was looking forward to just putting his feet up and relaxing in front of the TV. Before stepping on the pavement he lifted his head and looked at the sky, in which different shades of blue, pink and grey colours were blending in a surreal picture of the dusk setting in. This beautiful sight never ceased to amaze him, it took his mind off the umpteen meaningless arguments he had had with his boss in the office and for once gave him a feeling of being just a tiny and insignificant creature in the vastness of the nature around him.

As he was approaching the front door of his apartment block, in the dimness of the upcoming evening he noticed a slender figure of a young man rummaging through the content of one of the garbage bins standing by the road. First Vegard paid little attention to that man, but as he came closer, the young man's rather chaotic searching came to a halt. He stood still for a moment, waiting for that unexpected dark-haired intruder to pass by. Vegard glanced at him absent-mindedly and he suddenly noticed a pair of shy and rather anxious blue eyes staring at him. The young man’s greasy fair hair was partially tucked behind his small ears and his clothes looked dirty and stained. Vegard had no idea what it was about those big blue eyes that made him stop walking. His own dark chocolate eyes met the young man’s deep gaze for no more than a few seconds, but to Vegard it seemed an eternity. Ever since that moment his rational mind had had no explanation of what was going on inside his head, no matter how much he tried to process it later on, he was left with nothing but having to merely accept it. To accept the fact that he understood nothing, but he had a strong, unexplainable feeling that this strange meeting would somehow be important to him.

For a moment Vegard was standing without a single move, but before long he realized that he was in fact intimidating the young man, so he asked him with genuine concern:  
“Hey, what are you doing here?”  
The man froze, but he replied quietly: “Looking for some food leftovers. I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday.”  
Vegard couldn’t help asking further: “You look so young, are you homeless? How come you aren’t at school or at work?”  
“It’s a long story, I don’t want to bother you with that,” the young man averted his tired eyes back to the opened bin.  
Vegard felt lost, he didn’t know what to say, but he didn’t want to leave either. He suddenly remembered he had a two-hundred crown banknote in a pocket of his jacket and he pulled it out. Without a second thought he stretched his hand and offered the money to the young man.  
“Please, take it and get something to eat. Please,” he tried to persuade the boy, whose blue eyes widened in astonishment. Yet, he didn’t wait a second and took the banknote a little too eagerly from the curly dark-haired man.  
“Thank you, you needn’t have... It’s just... you’ve been the only person over a long time who’s really cared about me, thank you for that,” the young man uttered shyly, lifted his shabby dark blue rucksack from the ground, turned around and headed for the nearby park.

Vegard watched the slim man leaving for a while until he disappeared into the distance and then resumed walking slowly towards his apartment block. Not surprisingly, his mind had turned into the turmoil of contradictory thoughts. _Are you utterly mad giving so much money to a total stranger? Couldn’t you have asked him more about his life? What if he had just run away from a diagnostic institute for troubled adolescents? Shouldn’t you have offered him some other help too?_ He couldn’t stop thinking about that boy. Yes, he did actually look almost like a teenager.

When Vegard unlocked the front door of his studio apartment, took off his shoes behind the door and entered the living room, his head was still full of what had just happened outside. Vegard soon quit the idea of watching TV and after having a piece of tasteless pizza for dinner he decided to call it a day. While he was lying in his bed and slowly drifting off, the last picture he could see behind his closed eyelids was the young man’s innocent blue eyes.

\-----

The weekdays were running fast, keeping Vegard distressed and busy with loads of tasks to be sorted out at work. However, he couldn’t forget about the young man and his shy blue eyes. Every evening, when he was coming back from work, he carefully looked around before entering his apartment block, just in case he would spot the slender figure again, but in vain.

On Friday evening it was pouring with rain. Vegard parked his Honda Civic quite far from his front door, since it was impossible to find a vacant parking space any closer. He uttered a few swear words, while he was getting out of the car, because he had left his umbrella at home that day. He pulled out his regular weekly shopping from the back of the car and headed for his home as fast as possible.

The dark street was lit by a number of street lights standing in a quiet row on the pavement. By the bottom of one of them Vegard suddenly noticed a crouched person, dripping wet and trembling with cold, but he couldn’t make out any details. As he came closer, he realized that it was a man, who was hiding his face in his hands. Despite the heavy rain, Vegard spotted a dark blue rucksack lying next to the man and he recognized it unmistakably. His heart skipped a beat. He approached the man and slightly touched his forearm.  
“Hey, man, why are you sitting here in this frigging weather?” The young man slowly uncovered his face and looked at Vegard. Then, with a deep sigh of relief he slowly stood up and said:  
“I’ve been waiting for you... Thank goodness you are here at last!” At that moment Vegard spotted that the left cheek of the young man’s face is badly swollen.  
“Oh my, what’s happened to your face?” he asked in utter shock.  
“I’ve had a terrible toothache, didn’t know what to do, I can’t stand it much longer... It hurts like hell. So I thought...you... you’re the only one who has ever helped me, so...,” the young man stuttered. His sad eyes were full of tears threatening to flow out soon and mix with the falling rain.  
“Come on, we won’t stand here in this downpour. Just follow me,” Vegard replied without hesitation. He didn’t want to let them both linger any longer in this terrible weather.

He picked up the young man’s rucksack and they both walked swiftly to the apartment block where Vegard lived. He fumbled in his pockets for a while to find the keys, which wasn’t an easy task to do with all those bags and the young man’s rucksack in his hands, but finally he managed to open the door and they walked up the stairs to the first floor. Vegard opened the door of his apartment and switched on the lights. He went in, put down all the bags on the wooden cabinet behind the door and turned back to his trembling and dripping guest. With a smile he stretched his right hand to him.  
“My name’s Vegard. Come in and make yourself comfortable.” The poor young man accepted Vegard’s hand hesitantly.  
“I’m Bård. Thank you so much, Vegard,” he mumbled and they shook hands clumsily. Despite Bård apparently being in pain, his shy blue eyes lit with a faint smile and infinite gratitude to his host. He was looking around the apartment with interest, and then his eyes turned back to Vegard.  
“Do you happen to have any painkillers for my toothache, please? It’s getting really bad,” Bård complained with a slightly shaking voice. Vegard eyed him from head to toe with sympathy.  
“Of course, I’ll give you some pills, now take off your shoes and you can take a shower. The bathroom is over there behind the kitchenette. Do you have any clean clothes? I’ll give you a towel, wait a sec. Then I’ll take you to the dental emergency hospital.”  
“Is it really necessary?” Bård asked with an undisguised fear in his voice.  
“Do you want me to bring you a mirror?” Vegard smirked at him. Bård smiled sadly and replied that he was taking it as a compliment. Vegard chuckled softly and went to look for a towel.  
“But I don’t have any health insurance, let alone the money, you know how much a visit to a dentist can cost?” Bård added more seriously, trying to come up with some other objections to going to the dental emergency. Vegard threw a folded clean towel to him and told him to stop discussing and not to worry about money.  
Bård secretly lifted an eyebrow at Vegard’s strictness to him, but he had to admit he quite liked it. It was a long time ago that someone really took care of him. He put down the towel, leaned down to his wet rucksack, opened it and started taking out his possessions one by one. Every single piece of clothing seemed to be dirty and wet. Vegard was watching him for a while with an unreadable expression on his face, and then he opened his wardrobe and pulled out a clean pair of boxers, trousers, a white t-shirt and a hoodie.  
“Here you are, take these. In the meantime, before we come back from the dentist, we can switch on the washing machine to wash your laundry.” At that moment Bård’s expression already really resembled that one of a little doggie just rescued from a deep pit full of muggy water.  
“Vegard, why are you doing all this for me?” Bård asked with his big blue puppy eyes staring into the warm brown chocolate ones, while collecting Vegard’s clean clothes from him.  
“Why, why...... why did the tree go to the dentist?” Vegard responded jokingly.  
“What?” Bård turned to Vegard before entering the bathroom, confused.  
“Because it needed a root canal,” Vegard giggled at him.  
“Jeeez, don’t make me laugh, do you know how much it hurts?” Bård protested, burst out laughing and sobbing at the same time and closed the bathroom door from inside.


	2. II.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I promised to continue with my story, so here it is. Hope you´ll enjoy it. Looking forward to your feedback :)

As soon as the bathroom door had closed behind Bård, Vegard walked slowly to the dining table and had to sit down for a while. His mingled thoughts were like burning flashes popping into his head and disappearing in a split second and he needed some time to calm down. His rational mind was desperately trying to process the last ten minutes of his life. _Jeeez,_ w _hat are you doing? Do you really have to save every stray cat you come across? Isn’t this a bit over the top to take a complete stranger home and offer him your own clothes and even a lift to the hospital?_ Vegard had never done anything like that before and for now he wasn’t sure if it was only his innate kindness or if there was something about that young man that elicited so much sympathy from Vegard. He guessed it would probably be the latter.

 

As Vegard heard the stream of water flowing into the bath, a vivid memory of his ex-boyfriend Nils  came to his mind and totally caught him off guard. Nils, that cheeky and incredibly cute curly blond man, who Vegard had loved with all his heart. He would literally do anything for Nils. They had shared Vegard’s flat and very often, when Vegard was cooking dinner, Nils had taken to having a bath in the meantime. _Oh, what a fool you were when you had expected Nils had treasured the same feelings towards you!_  Vegard’s inner thoughts were torturing him again as they had done so many times since their break up. They had been together for more than two years when one evening about eight months ago Nils came home from work, packed his things up and told Vegard he was leaving him because he had found somebody else. Vegard’s whole world had crumbled into pieces on that horrible day. The memory of it still hurt him as much as it had done then. He still hadn’t got over Nils’s betrayal and he had promised to himself not to fall for another man so easily. As he was sitting quietly at the kitchen table and listening to the sounds from the bathroom, the memory of Nils brought tears to his eyes and for long minutes Vegard immersed himself in bottomless self-pity.    

 

The bathroom door opened abruptly, and when Vegard lifted his teary eyes, he saw Bård standing there in Vegard’s boxers and T-shirt, his wet golden hair jumping in all directions. Vegard was entirely mesmerized by the boy’s handsome and innocent looks. _If it wasn’t for his swollen cheek, he would look like a young Nordic god,_ he thought to himself.

Bård opened his mouth as if he wanted to ask something, but all of a sudden he noticed the tears in Vegard’s eyes. He took a few careful steps towards him.

“What’s going on, Vegard, why have you been crying?“ Bård asked him with a confused expression. Vegard immediately stood up from his chair and turned to the kitchen cabinets. It took him a moment to compose himself.

“Don’t worry, Bård, it’s nothing. I’ll be fine,“ he mumbled. He opened one of the cabinets and took out a small plastic box full of blisters with various pills and capsules. He found some ibuprofen and handed two pills to Bård together with a glass of water. A faint smile that Vegard managed to put on his face erased almost all signs of his previous sadness. Bård was watching him with sympathy. Despite wanting to support his new friend in any way, he knew it wasn’t the right place or time for further questions and he didn’t want to be nosy either. If Vegard wanted to tell him, he would.

“You know what, Vegard?“ Bård remarked suddenly, still holding the glass of water and the two pills in his hands. “My grandma always used to say that it isn’t healthy to bottle up your emotions. ‘If you need to cry, do it’, she used to tell me many times. So, if you feel like crying now, feel free,“ he added with raised eyebrows and a rather theatrical expression on his face. Vegard’s eyes widened in astonishment. Bård’s serious words, contrasting with his innocent boyish looks had an entirely opposite effect on him. He chuckled softly. He didn’t want to burst out laughing, he really didn’t, but it was impossible. He started coughing to conceal his amusement.

“You know what, Bård? Thank you for your invaluable advice and now you take those pills and then do something with that bird’s nest on your pretty head. I guess you don’t want to frighten the dentist.“

Bård grinned broadly at him, happy about his successful attempt to improve Vegard’s mood. _Did he really say ‘your pretty head’ or was he just imagining it?_ Bård thought to himself in disbelief. They were standing next to each other at the kitchen countertop. Bård was emptying the glass of water and Vegard intently watched his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. Even though he had no intention to stare at Bård, he couldn’t find it in him to avert his eyes from his flawless features. What made things even worse for Vegard as he was standing so near him, his nose caught a faint scent of shampoo, a familiar fragrance to him, of course, yet combined with a unique, clean and very attractive scent of Bård’s hair and body, as Vegard had to admit reluctantly. _Now that’s enough! Is it really so easy to forget that you swore you won’t fall for anyone else for a long time?_ Vegard’s inner voice shouted at him. Luckily, after putting down the empty glass Bård disappeared in the bathroom again. Vegard exhaled, but he didn’t get much time to calm down his unwelcomed excitement. In a few seconds Bård peaked out of the door again.

“Can I borrow your hairdryer, please? My hair takes quite a long time to dry,“ he asked.

“Sure, it’s in the first drawer below the washbasin. Tell me when you’re ready. Yes, and put your clothes into the washing machine,“ Vegard reminded him with a rather bossy tone in his voice and he went to get his car keys, wallet and documents ready. He was wondering why he was talking to Bård so firmly, since it was not like him at all. He realized though that he was doing it for the sole reason of his own self-protection.

 

After twenty minutes of final preparations like looking for a clean pair of socks for Bård, rummaging through the freezer to find some ice packs for Bård, opening a new set of toothbrushes, yes, again for Bård, they could finally leave the apartment. Vegard checked if all the lights are off and locked the door. Bård seemed to be a bit down again, because he was completely silent when they got into the car and his smile disappeared.

“Does it hurt a lot, Bård?“ Vegard asked him compassionately. He felt a strong urge to hug the poor thing sitting next to him, but he just slightly patted him on his forearm and assured him all will be okay.

“Not so much now, the pills kicked in quite quickly,“ replied Bård silently. „It’s just, you know, I’m so  afraid of dentists!“

“If you think you’re an exception, you’re wrong,“ Vegard uttered with a smile. “I am too. But I’m sure they will offer you an injection. And don’t dare to reject it!“

“But it will cost even more,“ Bård protested mildly. Vegard glanced at him and for a short moment he immersed himself again in his beautiful blue eyes, which were watching him with a mixture of worries and gratitude.

“I have already told you not to worry about how much it will cost, Bård. The most important thing is to take care of your toothache now.“

Bård smiled, more to himself than to Vegard, and as he was looking out of the window at the lights of the city, he said: “My grandma also used to say that you get to meet angels here on Earth. Well, it seems she was right.“ After hearing Bård’s words Vegard’s heart skipped a beat. He clutched the wheel and felt another surge of tears welling up in his eyes. He didn’t dare to look at Bård, but he could feel his soft and expectant gaze from the seat next to him. _What an emotional wreck you are!_ Vegard overheard his inner voice again. All of a sudden, he decided to pull up the car at the side of the road. He turned to Bård and without a word he spread his arms and pulled him in a tight hug.

 


End file.
